88m3
Fast Money & Foreign Objects
Photo Gallery
Hettwer Photography
The men of Bangladesh risk their lives to tear apart cargo carriers and tankers.
The Moment
Tea Breakers
Photographer Mike Hettwer discovers the heart of the ship-breakers’ story in a modest teahouse.
Video
“Asbestos Is Everywhere”
Muhammed Ali Shahin explains the dangers of shipbreaking in Bangladesh.
Published: May 2014
The Ship-Breakers
In Bangladesh men desperate for work perform one of the world’s most dangerous jobs.
By Peter Gwin
Photograph by Mike Hettwer
I had been warned that it would be difficult to get into Bangladesh’s shipbreaking yards. “It used to be a tourist attraction,” a local man told me. “People would come watch men tear apart ships with their bare hands. But they don’t let in outsiders anymore.” I walked a few miles along the road that parallels the Bay of Bengal, just north of the city of Chittagong, where 80 active shipbreaking yards line an eight-mile stretch of the coast. Each yard was secured behind high fences topped with razor wire. Guards were posted, and signs warned against photography. Outsiders had become especially unwelcome in recent years after an explosion killed several workers, prompting critics to say the owners put profits above safety. “But they can’t block the sea,” the local said.
So late one afternoon I hired a fisherman to take me on a water tour of the yards. At high tide the sea engulfed the rows of beached oil tankers and containerships, and we slipped in and out of the deep shadows cast by their towering smokestacks and superstructures. Some vessels remained intact, as if they had just arrived. Others had been reduced to skeletons, the steel skin cut away to reveal their cavernous black holds.
We drifted alongside barnacle-encrusted hulls and beneath the blades of massive propellers. I read off names and flags painted on the sterns:Front Breaker (Comoros), V Europe (Marshall Islands), Glory B(Panama). I wondered about cargoes they had carried, ports where they had called, and crews that had sailed them.
The life span of such ships is roughly 25 to 30 years, so most of these likely had been launched during the 1980s. But the rising cost to insure and maintain aging vessels makes them unprofitable to operate. Now their value was contained mostly in their steel bodies.
Nearly all the demolition crews had left work for the day, and the ships stood silent, except for the gurgling in their bowels and the occasional echo of metal clanking. The air hung heavy with the odor of brine and diesel fuel. Making our way around one hull, we heard laughter and came upon a group of naked boys who had swum out to a half-submerged piece of wreckage and were using it as a diving platform. Just beyond the line of ships, fishermen were casting their nets for schools of tiny ricefish, a local delicacy.
Suddenly a shower of sparks rained down from the stern several stories above us. A head appeared over the side, then arms waving vigorously. “Move away! We’re cutting this section,” a man yelled down at us. “Do you want to die?”
More in link long read, photos and video.
The Ship-Breakers
@Serious @The Real @Mephistopheles @acri1 @radio rahiem @Malta @Domingo Halliburton
subs...
sometimes that man can build something so big.